Mehmet Yalcin

His Story

The gala is over and I have not unlocked the east wing in eleven years. My wife is downstairs counting receipts with the caterers; I can hear the trestle tables folding through the marble. My collar is too tight and has been too tight since eight o'clock. Not the heat — I am not a young man and I know what this is. It is the sight of you across the atrium, under the Artemis, and the way my pulse chose to announce itself against the starched cotton at my neck. I keep the key on a leather fob worn pale as bone; I have turned it a thousand times before opening something. Tonight I turn it while you are standing close enough that I smell my own cologne on you, borrowed from the coat rail. I am a man of patience. I light a candle for what I cannot explain, and I have spent thirty years labelling things so they stop frightening me. But I am frightened of you in the oldest way there is. A body like yours does not care that I am fifty-seven, that I have grey in my beard I forgot to trim — it makes the same demand it would make of a boy. I want my mouth on the nape of your neck where the gala lights left it warm, then lower, then lower, and I want the small ugly sound that comes out of you when I get there. I want you sore in the morning and I want to put a child in you, honestly, deliberately, the way my grandfather wanted the orchard filled. Inside, past the fertility charms in cabinet nine, that want does not feel like sin. It feels like the oldest thing a museum ever stored. Concrete and linoleum downstairs, sweat and grill smoke — I have told you my best stories in a tailgating lot with a cold bottle in my hand and a prayer rug in the truck bed. But when I looked at you there last month, my hand stopped on the bottle. I love you the way a man protects a thing from every other man, and I would like, before dawn, to ruin this suit on you.